Myth: Capitalism is the most environmentally friendly economic system.

Fact: Non-industrial and regulated industrial systems are the most environmentally friendly.

Summary

This statement is more false than conservatives realize; non-industrialized
countries actually have the cleanest environments. But among industrialized
societies, Europe and Japan are cleaner than the U.S., which is cleaner
than the former Soviet Union. Translated into systems, this means that
well-regulated capitalist economies are cleaner than less regulated capitalist
economies, which are cleaner than completely unregulated dictatorships.
These last are considered unregulated because the officials in charge
of production (the Soviet planners) were also their own regulators. Of
course, the Soviet planners did not regulate themselves in their drive
to catch up to Western levels of productivity, any more than Western polluters
regulate themselves. A correlation thus emerges: the greater the regulation,
the less the pollution.

Argument

The claim that capitalism is the most environmentally friendly
economic system is false in more ways than one. The cleanest societies
in the world are actually the non-industrial ones -- most of South America
and Africa, for example. Where industry rises, pollution fills the air,
water and land.

This would suggest that arguing over which type of industrial society
is cleaner is much like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. However,
there is one hopeful development, and that is that most Western industrial
societies are going through a period of deindustrialization. The percentage
of workers employed in manufacturing jobs in capitalist countries has been
falling for decades:

The cause for this decline is twofold: consumers are demanding a higher
percentage of services over goods, and production efficiency is continually
improving. Production efficiency happened first in farming, where improvements
in technology boosted output so much that the number of American farmers
could decline 76 percent between 1941 and 1991, yet produce more food than
ever before. (2) The same thing is happening to the rest of industry. Robot
assembly lines have greatly boosted productive efficiency. Likewise, the
Internet allows a person to send messages instantly and electronically
instead of requiring a mailman to haul wood-based products in a gas-guzzling
truck. But this efficiency is a double-edged sword; we can use it to decrease
our workload and lessen the damage to the environment, or we can use it
to boost productivity to still higher levels that accelerate environmental
destruction. Which option society takes will demonstrate how enlightened
it is.

But as long as society remains industrialized to some degree, what
type of economic system is friendliest? Conservatives point to the environmental
devastation of the former Soviet Union as proof that socialism isn't it.
And it is true, the former Soviet Union is by far more environmentally
ravaged than the West. This goes well beyond Chernobyl, which will leave
much of the Ukraine dangerous to inhabit for thousands of years. The Soviets
drained two-thirds of the Aral Sea (one of the largest seas in the world)
for irrigation, with disastrous results, including massive salt storms
whenever the wind rises. In the highly centralized steel production city
of Magnitogorsk, air pollution is so deadly that it is difficult to give
birth to a live baby. No less than half of all recruits for military service
are physically unfit for duty. The life expectancy of the average Russian
male is 13 years lower than his American counterpart, and rapidly dropping.
The once-fabled forests of Eastern Europe are dead, stripped of leaves
and rotting away. How these nations are going to deal with their widespread
environmental disasters is a mystery. Fortunately, the people themselves
are aware of these problems, and there is a strong green movement in the
former communist states.

Conservatives claim that socialism was so destructive to the environment
because no one owned private property. "When no one owns private property,
there is no incentive to keep it clean and pure because no one has a stake
in keeping up its value," writes Rush Limbaugh. (3) According to this
logic, however, America's national and public parks should be more polluted
than private lands -- which they are not, because a large majority of the
population reveres and protects our public parks. Furthermore, the American
people have hired national park rangers to serve as custodians for these
lands -- which refutes this conservative argument outright.

A more accurate reason why Soviet socialism was so environmentally
destructive was because the regulator and the producer were the same entity:
the Soviet government. Moscow itself was in control of production, and
it regulated itself no better than any factory dumping pollution regulates
itself. That is, there was no higher authority telling the Soviet planners
that they couldn't pollute in their efforts to boost production. Contrary
to what conservatives claim, the Soviet economy wasn't over-regulated;
it wasn't regulated at all.

Needless to say, the top goal of the Soviet planners was to catch up
to the West, and they thought they could sacrifice a part of their vast
and seemingly infinite environment to obtain this goal. Also, the natural
environment in Russia is a harsh one, filled with long, bitter winters
and unproductive farmland. Russians have had a long tradition of viewing
nature as the "enemy," one to be conquered by brute force just
to be able to survive. Communist leaders from Lenin to Chernenko encouraged
workers to vanquish nature as a superior method of survival.

In contrast to the unregulated Soviet economy, there are varying degrees
of regulation in Western nations. By far, Europe and Japan are more heavily
regulated than the U.S. And Europe and Japan are also cleaner than
the U.S. (The statistics supporting these two observations will follow
below.) What all these international examples show is that there is an
elegant correlation between the amount of environmental regulation and
the environmental health of industrialized nations.

Conservatives may find this conclusion outrageous, but even a domestic
review of American history proves that government, not the free market,
has been at the forefront of environmental protection. Every pro-environmental
policy that the free market has ever adopted was forced upon it by government.
The Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Superfund, as well as the bans
on asbestos, leaded gasoline, DDT, strip mining, aerial nuclear testing,
and untreated waste dumping were all acts of congress, not business.
Big business has never voluntarily sought to lower its profit margins
to protect the environment. Every one of these laws had to be passed over
the vehement opposition of business leaders and conservatives in congress.

The difficulty of arguing that "unfettered capitalism is green"
can be seen in the following quote by Rush Limbaugh. Here, Rush describes
industry's reaction to the Cuyahoga River, the notorious river that was
so polluted it caught fire three times:

"We set out to clean it up, we rolled up our sleeves, and we did it.
I'm sure some regulation was used, but the major factor was good
old American know-how. If you go to Cleveland today you'll see nonpolluting
businesses operating all along that river." (4) [Emphasis added.]

Rush distorts the facts. The image of a river so polluted that it caught
on fire was a vivid one in the press, and the public became outraged by
it. The government quickly imposed some of the strictest environmental
regulations in the nation on the industries responsible. The reason why
the river was so polluted in the first place was because big business had
been allowed to pursue profit no matter what the damage it caused to the
community. It was only after it was regulated that the river became clean.
Rush lamely adds that it was "American know-how" that cleaned
up the river. If so, then why did business not apply that know-how before
society compelled them? The answer is that it hurt the bottom line.

The following statistics show that Europe and Japan are environmentally
cleaner than the U.S.

NOTE: Substantial portions of the following were reproduced with permission
from WHERE WE STAND, by Michael Wolff, Peter Rutten, Albert Bayers III,
and the World Rank Research Team
(New York: Bantam Books, 1992). Copyright (c) 1992 by Michael Wolff
& Company, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of the contents of WHERE
WE STAND may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without
the written permission of the copyright owner. Requests for permission
should be sent to Michael Wolff & Company, Inc., 520 Madison Avenue,
11th Floor, New York, NY 10022, phone 212-308-8100, fax 212-308-7425, or
email to mwolff@ypn.com.
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